10 Ways To Burn Up To 60% More Calories Every Workout

No matter if you're new to exercise or an experienced gym-goer, these simple tweaks can help you speed up weight loss, push through plateaus, and get more muscle-toning benefits out of every workout—and each technique has science on its side. Best of all, many of these easy moves work to jumpstart a lagging metabolism so you continue to burn extra calories throughout the day—even while you sleep!

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1. Swing those arms.
Turn your walking into a calorie-torching workout by bending your elbows 90 degrees and pumping your arms as you stride. It not only automatically speeds up your pace but helps you burn up to 15% more calories every time you work out. For proper pumping: Trace an arc from your waist to your chest as you swing. Your thumbs should come close to touching your waistband as your elbow goes backward. Also, make sure to keep elbows in and don't let hands cross past the middle of your chest (in front of your sternum). Too much side-to-side motion drags down your pace.

2. Pop in headphones.
You can fight flagging energy with music: Working out to your favorite fitness playlist can help you to go up to 20% longer and burn more calories, finds a study from West London's Brunel University. Music blocks fatigue, produces feelings of vigor, and helps you keep pace by synchronizing your movements, says study author Costas Karageorghis, PhD. (Check out what fitness pros have on their playlists.)

3. Put on some weight.
To really rev your calorie burn, it is not about the number of reps, but the size of the weights. Even when exercisers lifted identical volumes (such as 10 pounds 10 times or 20 pounds 5 times), those using the heavier dumbbells burned about 25% more calories when they were finished. "Heavy weights create more protein breakdown in the muscle, so your body has to use more energy to repair and recover—that's how lean muscle tissue is built," says researcher Anthony Caterisano, PhD, of Furman University. Bonus: working out with heavy weights even for as few as 3 to 6 reps increased exercisers' sleeping metabolic rate—the number of calories burned overnight—by nearly 8%. That's enough to lose about 5 pounds in a year, even if you did nothing else! (Give this super-speedy sculpting routine a try.)

4. Quench with cool water.

Photo by Yuji Kotani/Getty Images

A fresh-out-of-the-fridge water bottle may energize you for warm-weather exercise, finds a British study. Exercisers who drank refrigerated water (39°F) worked out about 25% longer than those who consumed the same amount of warmer water—and they said their exercise sessions felt easier too. Whether you're inside or out, sipping chilled water both before and during exercise may help keep your body temperature down and your energy up for maximum calorie burn. (Sick of plain water? Sip these 25 slimming water recipes instead.)

5. Break up your sets.
Instead of performing 2 or 3 sets of a single exercise before moving to the next one, do a circuit: Complete just 1 set and then immediately move to the next exercise, repeating the circuit 2 or 3 times. When researchers had testers do either standard strength-training (3 sets of 6 exercises with 2 minutes of rest in between) or circuit-training (moving through a series of 6 exercises 3 times, with 30 seconds of rest in between), the circuit-trainers burned nearly twice as many calories postworkout as the standard-style lifters. "Because your heart rate stays elevated longer after circuit-training, you continue burning fat as though you were still exercising," says researcher Anthony Caterisano.

6. Head outside.
Trade the treadmill for trails. Besides the fresh air and better scenery, heading outside can give your workout a major boost. Research finds that exercisers burn 10% more calories when they walk or run outdoors than they do on a treadmill at the same speed. "You use more energy to propel yourself over the ground," explains fitness expert Jay Blahnik, author of Full Body Flexibility, "and pushing a little against the wind or other elements burns more calories, too."

7. Crank up the incline.
If bad weather forces you indoors, challenge yourself on the treadmill. Crank up the incline to firm up your derriere and rev up your calorie burn by up to 60%. And when you come back down to earth, walking will feel easier.
To safely take your walks to the next level, follow these guidelines:

Start easy. Do a 5-minute slow walk and then a 10-minute brisk pace before adding your first hill.

Go 5 and 5. Alternate 5-minute hills with 5 minutes of level walking. Repeat as often as you like. Cool down for 5 minutes.

Inch up. You may only be able to walk a 1% incline initially. The key is to maintain the same speed during the hills as you do with no incline. Aim for a 3.5 mph speed, and keep your hills moderate; a 5% incline is a great goal, and go no more than 7%. (Steeper inclines put too much strain on your back, hips, and ankles.)

8. Log at least 12 minutes.
Any amount of cardio will burn calories, but to really fight off pounds, you need at least 12 minutes (beyond a warm-up) of continuously moderate to high-intensity activity (where you're breathing somewhat hard) most days a week. That's the amount necessary to "create a training effect, which improves your body's ability to use oxygen and generate more fat-burning enzymes, such as lipase, so you can blast more fat during exercise and other activities all day," says Chip Harrison, exercise physiologist, director of strength and fitness at Pennsylvania State University, and coauthor of The Female Athlete.

9. Cut your workouts in half.
Introducing short bouts of vigorous activity can speed up weight loss and cut your workout time by up to half or more. Australian researchers found that women who alternated just 8 seconds of high-intensity exercise with 12 seconds of low-intensity activity for 20 minutes, 3 times a week, slimmed down faster than steady-paced exercisers who worked out twice as long. Those who did intervals lost up to 16 pounds, shrunk their bellies by 12% and their thighs by 15%, and gained, on average, 1½ pounds of metabolism-revving muscle in 4 months—without dieting! Get started with these 20-minute interval workouts.

10. Don't skip stretching.
Stretching keeps your muscles flexible, helping to prepare them for exercise and recover from the effort afterward. Skip the stretches, and you won't get nearly the benefits you should from aerobic exercise and resistance training. "Stretching helps you move freely during aerobic exercise, it enables your muscles to build more strength during weight training, and it helps keep muscles long and lean," says Sharon Willett, a physical therapist and sports trainer at the Virginia Sportsmedicine Institute in Arlington, Virginia. (Get started with these 3 feel-good stretches.)